A few years ago a guy came to my door with a small present: a box of chocolate cookies and an empty travel mug.
“This is for you,” he said. Then he asked if he could come in.
“I have a story to tell you,” he said. “It goes back five hundred days.”
Now, I play the bagpipes and sometimes people will give me a gift after I’ve played at a function, usually because the sound of the pipes touched them more than they expected. As I welcomed this man into our home I was trying to recall where I’d played a year and a half ago.
When the man sat down it was obvious that what he was about to say was difficult for him.
“I’m an alcoholic,” he began. “It’s been five hundred days since my last drink.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say or why he was telling me this. And so I didn’t say anything. I sat and I listened. He told me how he’d lost everything—his house, his family, his job, his car. He told me he’d sunk to scavenging the streets, picking up empty cans to get enough money to drink.
He said he’d gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and tried to quit drinking. But after a few days, he said, he’d given up.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said.
Instead, he got a six-pack of beer and half a bottle of vodka and went into the bush. He told me he was already drunk when he got there and started in on the vodka and the beer. And, he said, that’s when he decided to end his life.
“I put a gun into my mouth,” he told me. “I had my finger on the trigger. I can remember thinking, I’m coming now, God.”
He started to pull the trigger when he heard bagpipes. The pipes were playing “Amazing Grace.”
“I stopped what I was doing,” the man told me, “and I followed the sound of the bagpipes. They led me to your backyard.”
It’s rare, as you can imagine, that people drop in to listen to me play the pipes. My wife says she does remember someone briefly showing up one day around that time.
The man told me that after he left our backyard he went back to AA and someone, his sponsor I think, told him to write down everything he could remember about that Friday evening. He told me that this time he’d stuck with the program and that visiting me was part of his milestones to recovery.
I never met him again. He’s moved out of town. But I think of him often and hope he’s managed to stay away from alcohol.
Fort McMurray, Alberta